U.S. and Canadian authorities announced Wednesday that they have broken up a human smuggling ring suspected of illegally shepherding dozens of Indian and Pakistani nationals into Washington state from British Columbia. To date, a federal grand jury in Seattle has indicted 14 U.S. and Canadian men for their roles in the alleged scheme. Twelve had been arrested as of Wednesday. Leigh Winchell, special agent in charge of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Seattle, said investigators on both sides of the border have worked closely for more than a year, apprehending roughly 50 people who had paid as much as $35,000 apiece to be smuggled into the United States. They were given fake U.S. Passports and were expected to fan out across the United States, reports CBS News correspondent Bill Whitaker. ... http://www.cbsnews.com

Fighter jets escorted a commercial plane carrying 172 people to an airport in Scotland on Wednesday after a passenger passed the captain a note saying there was a bomb on board, and the plane landed safely, authorities said.Ryanair Flight FR25, a Boeing 737 en route from Paris to Dublin, was escorted to Glasgow's Prestwick Airport, which was closed for about two hours while army explosives experts searched the plane. No bomb was found, Strathclyde police said.The 167 passengers and five crew were safely escorted off the plane and questioned at the airport, police said.Later, all the passengers were allowed to continue their journey, arriving at Dublin International Airport aboard the aircraft shortly before midnight — about nine hours after the incident began, Ryanair spokeswoman Pauline McAlester said....http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-04-12-jet-bomb_x.htm

The Catholic Church is having early success in fighting proposals in state legislatures that would permit people claiming they were sexually abused as children to sue priests and other church officials long after the alleged offenses occurred. Measures proposed in nine states would suspend statutes of limitation and allow lawsuits to be filed regardless of when an alleged offense took place. The proposals are patterned on a 2003 California law that allowed a one-year window for suits to be filed there without regard to the statute of limitations. Since March, aggressive lobbying by the church helped to bottle up such a measure in a state Senate committee in Maryland, and to alter the language of an Ohio bill to rule out new lawsuits. A bill in Colorado's Legislature is being debated, but it's a long shot because of intense Catholic opposition, the bill's supporters say. The church is gearing up to fight proposals in Delaware, Hawaii, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin...http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2006-04-12-catholics_x.htm

Eight Bandidos were slain after Wayne Kellestine was tipped about separate plots to either take his life or take away his biker's patch, sources say. Kellestine, 56, whose Iona Station farm is now under the forensic microscope as a suspected human slaughterhouse, had become such an embarrassment to the Bandidos that he was to be eliminated - one way or the other, sources say. Some police and biker sources say the massacre at Kellestine's farm came just as a four-man Bandidos hit squad was about to leave Chicago and enter Canada. And an ex-Bandidos biker said the eight men were taken out when they visited Kellestine to "kick him out of the club." "The guys went down to pick up (Kellestine's) patch and his bike," the former member said. ...http://edmsun.canoe.ca/News/Canada/2006/04/12/1530995-sun.html

While official results indicate an Italian election victory for Romano Prodi, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has yet to concede defeat. The ballots from abroad, he says, have "many, many murky aspects." Italy has long been the butt of jokes across Europe for its often wobbly governments and frequent general elections. But rarely has the situation been as precarious as it is now following the 2-day general elections which finished on Monday. Official results released by the Interior Ministry on Tue evening indicate that Romano Prodi, head of a multi-party center-left coalition, barely defeated current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his coalition of center-right parties. But even as Prodi moved ahead Wed with the process of selecting Cabinet members, Berlusconi is still refusing to concede defeat and is demanding a recount. Only 25,000 votes separate the 2 candidates with 38 million Italians having gone to the polls. Berlusconi called Prodi's victory claims "irresponsible."...http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,411095,00.html

President George W. Bush lied to the American public when he claimed two trailers captured by U.S. troops in Iraq in May 2003 were mobile "biological laboratories." At the time he made the claim, U.S. intelligence officials already knew it was not true and had told the President the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of the trailers, declaring "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." But a Pentagon-sponsored fact-finding mission had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons, citing government officials and weapons experts who participated in the secret mission or had direct knowledge of it. The group's unanimous findings had been sent to the Pentagon in a field report, two days before the president's statement....http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8441.shtml